Wednesday, July 06, 2005

New Hartford, NY Had A Bad Day (amended title)

The birthplace of the McChronicles. The muse of our angst. So recently feted for being awesome. So quick to fall from grace.

The McChronicles hosted a focus team of 16- and 17-year old boys for lunch at the Route 5 New Hartford store today. In short - DISASTER!

First impressions:
  • very messy
  • non-crew-appearing person doing some form of clean-up, shouting, not really cleaning anything

LINE WAIT: 25 seconds

ORDER WAIT: 90 seconds

ORDER ACCURACY: one order entered properly (on receipt) delivered erroneously (wrong meal)

At 2PM, with very few people in the dining room, the place was a complete mess. One person (disguised as a non-uniformed person) was seen moving mop & bucket, and a broom around, eventually abandoning them in the aisle. He spent a lot of time talking very loudly across the room to the other crew, and to a few customers. Nothing got cleaned during our 1-hour stay. In fact, the place got progressively worse.

Cleaning supplies piled up, there was literally NO CLEAN PLACE for our party of 4 to sit. When the clean-up person noticed the drive-thru line backed up right to the highway (with cars observed bailing out of the line occasionally), he announced, to no one in particular, "Holy S@#*, the drive-thru is backed up!" At that point one of our group commented, "It isn't this wacky in Home Depot, let alone in any restaurant. Why should we have to eat in these conditions?"

The focus group seemed insulted and angered by the mess, by the disrespect shown to the patrons, and eventually by everything that wasn't good. Your basic snowball effect.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i would hardly say one bad visit is "falling apart", when the last 6 or 7 have been solid.
sounds like they just had a bad day. hopefully there won't be anymore anytime soon.

McChronicles said...

You know what? You are right. The title will be amended from, "New Hartford, NY Falls Apart".
Thanks!